The Af/Pak Plan: Mind The Gaps

By Steve Hynd

Is there any doubt that if Bush had turned out such a short-on-detail plan as Obama has for America's strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, progressives and more hawkish Democrats would both have roundly condemned him for proceeding on a wing and a prayer? The best you can say about it is that it could be worse, it could be a full-on prescription for neocon or neoliberal-style interventionism throughout the region.

Instead, Obama is being treated to the plaudits of the neocon right and right-leaning Villagers for "doubling down" in the War On Terror while many partisan Dems look for reasons to support the unsupportable. I've been told by people usually capable of far clearer thinking that the lack of detail is a plus - that it allows for flexibility to changing conditions - repeating the line already being pushed by Bruce Riedel, the ex-CIA man and Brookings scholar who chaired the administration's review.

The President feels very strongly that this strategy needs to be flexible and adaptable. ... It's going to be a long and difficult road ahead. And he wants to have, and we have built into the strategy, maximum flexibility and adaptability. ... So the theme of this process is to be flexible, adaptable and comprehensive, and self-regulating with periodic reviews.

But there's a massive difference between flexibility and writing yourself a carte blanche to claim any success as part of the plan and sidestep any failure as being too soon to tell.

There are a small but growing group of foreign policy experts and journalists from right and left who are speaking out on the pitfalls and gaps in the Obama strategy though.

Rightwing hawk Philip Zelikow writes that "Obama's strategy review seems to have reaffirmed and extended the core conclusions of the review done in the last months of the Bush administration, overseen by Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute" but Zelikow has a list of "blanks" in the strategy as released and says it's impossible to evaluate the prospects for that plan without filling them in. The first five, in order of importance, are all about Pakistan. The most worrying blank he identifies for me is that the Obama administration has no articulated policy for "how the United States would attempt to enforce its nominal benchmarks on Pakistani actions."

Meanwhile Juan Cole, writing at Salon, says Obama has invented a new Domino Theory.

Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble.

He acknowledged that we deserve a "straightforward answer" as to why the U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. "So let me be clear," he said, "Al-Qaida and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But his characterization of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading.

... Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise.

Robert Dreyfuss has problems with gaps in the strategy too:

Asked about the "exit strategy" -- Obama, in his 60 Minutes interview, promised that his Afghan plan would have an exit strategy -- Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, replied:

The only exit strategy that Bruce and Michelle and I and the people we work for and with can see is pretty basic. We can leave as the Afghans can deal with their own security problems. That's why the President today put emphasis on training the National Army, training and improving the National Police.

Of course, that's no exit strategy. It could easily take a decade to build up the ANA and the ANP, both dysfunctional institutions. And it's virtually impossible for the Afghan state, even under ideal conditions, to support the vast expense of a security force involving hundreds of thousands of troops.

Obama didn't say anything, at all, about timetables.

Neither Obama, nor anyone in his administration, nor their supporters on this plan, are talking about timetables. They're not talking about costs either. Those two are the biggest gaps of all.

The number of commentators willing to paper over all these gaps just because "not Bush" is putting forward this plan is unconscionable. It smacks altogether too much of the "clap harder" cheerleading we're used to seeing from loyal Bushies over the last eight years and reminds me that the default position of American foreign policy these past five decades has been military intervention - it comes all to easily. Far worse, though, are those not mentioning this trillion-dollar, 15 year experiment in foreign policy at gunpoint at all.

So what's my alternative?

I simply don't see that the West has an inherent national interest in either Afghanistan or Pakistan that somehow gives us the *moral* right to keep meddling. Invasion does not extend meddling rights either - you can't logically derive a moral imperative to interfere from an intentional immoral act. (The original Pottery Barn rule is: you broke it, pay for it and get out of our f**king store!)

And, by the way, the chances of extremists actually taking over Pakistan and its nukes are round about nil. The military owns that nation and isn't going to be turfed out of that position in a generation or more.

Thus I'd prefer a policy of withdrawal with reperations followed by containment. That containment would involve, as a beginning:

- A big push on intel gathering followed by minimalist (i.e. snipers, not drones) military intervention aimed at hothousing moderates in extremist groups (including AQ) by killing hardliners and covertly aiding moderates to positions of power in those organisations.

- Negotiations as and when available with those moderates. The N.I. peace process, not Gaza, should be the paradigm.

- Involving other (more) interested regional parties in talks, in reconstruction efforts, in CT efforts, in stabilization, in peacekeeping - all in as much as its possible for them to do so given their own national interests.

- Far more emphasis on International law enforcement and domestic security efforts to stymie any hardline extremists trying to export their violence and preferably kill or capture them. Can you imagine if we'd spent a tenth of what's been spent so far on Iraq on actual domestic security measures like proper container scanning, winnowing the "no fly" list so it was relevant or training domestic police properly in cultural nuances and in spotting the danger signs?

- Far more emphasis on accountable reconstruction and rennaisance aid via civilian agencies (not via military-led teams) and a massive beefing up of non-military nation-building ability at either State or a new department (tens of thousands, not hundreds). So that Western help doesn't have to come in a uniformed package.

- Stop fighting the war on some some drugs. Buy up then destroy crops if needed to reduce supply in the short term without hurting growers' pockets (like bribing insurgents to stop fighting, its cheaper to bribe farmers to stop growing than deprive them of their income then fight them into submission). Decriminalise to help deprive black market cartels of their income stream. Gradually re-educate and re-equip farmers for other crops to replace their income stream.

- Use of the only leverage we really have vs Pakistan and India's military if we really need their detente - threaten to cut each off. They know how much better Western shiny toys are compared to Chinese or Russian ones. If either won't play ball, do it. Resumption dependent on their co-operativeness.

There's a lot similiar to Obama's plan there but the emphasis is very different. The emphasis is withdrawal rather than generational nation-building attempts that are unlikley to work out in our favor. And yes, I know Obama says he isn't doing nation building in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Back to Dreyfuss:

To a degree, the president seemed to endorse a far more limited goal in Afghanistan than a nation-building effort to create a Western-style democracy. Instead, he announced a more modest goal:

I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That's the goal that must be achieved.

But, in contrast, at the briefing afterward, Riedel and Michelle Flournoy of the Defense Department were asked if the Obama plan represented a shift away from "counterinsurgency" (generally assumed to mean a broader, long-term effort to eliminate a rooted insurgency or rebellion, which usually involves huge numbers of troops) to "counterterrorism" (meaning a more limited, anti-Al Qaeda effort). Here's the exchange:

Q Should we see this as an abandonment or shift from the counterinsurgency mission that had been undertaken in Iraq and to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, shifting from that to a much more narrowly focused counterterror mission?

MR. RIEDEL: Absolutely not. I'll let Michelle talk a little bit more about counterinsurgency, but I think there is nothing minimalist about this approach.

MS. FLOURNOY: If anything, I would say what we're doing is stepping up to more fully resource a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan that is designed to first reverse Taliban gains and secure the population, particularly in the most contested areas of the south and east; second, provide the Afghan national security forces with the training and the mentoring they need to expand rapidly and to take -- ultimately take the lead in providing security for their nation; and finally, to provide a secure environment that will enable governance and development efforts to take root and grow.

If that's true, then Obama's "clear and focused goal" is actually a lot less clear and a lot more unfocused.

Too unclear and too unfocussed.